Gordimer, Nadine (20 November 1923 - )
Nadine Gordimer (20 November 1923 - )
Rowland Smith
University of Calgary
1991 Nobel Prize in Literature Presentation Speech
Press Release: The Nobel Prize in Literature 1991
Gordimer: Nobel Lecture, 7 December 1991
This entry has been expanded by Smith from his Gordimer entry in DLB 225: South African Writers. See also the Gordimer entry in DLB Yearbook: 1991.
BOOKS: Face to Face: Short Stories (Johannesburg: Silver Leaf, 1949);
The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1952; London: Gollancz, 1953);
The Lying Days (London: Gollancz, 1953; New York: Simon Schuster, 1953);
Six Feet of the Country (London: Gollancz, 1956; New York: Simon & Schuster, 1956);
A World of Strangers (London: Gollancz, 1958; New York: Simon Schuster, 1958);
Friday’s Footprint and Other Stories (London: Gollancz, 1960; New York: Viking, 1960);
Occasion for Loving (London: Gollancz, 1963; New York: Viking, 1963);
Not For Publication and Other Stories (London: Gollancz, 1965; New York: Viking, 1965);
The Late Bourgeois World (London: Gollancz, 1966; New York: Viking, 1966);
A Guest of Honour (New York: Viking, 1970; London: Cape, 1971);
Livingstone’s Companions (New York: Viking, 1971; London: Cape, 1972);
African Literature: The Lectures Given on this Theme at the University of Cape Town’s Public Summer School, February, 1972 (Cape Town: Board of Extramural Studies, University of Cape Town, 1972);
The Black Interpreters: Notes on African Writing (Johannesburg: Spro-Cas/Ravan, 1973);
The Conservationist (London: Cape, 1974; New York: Viking, 1975);
Selected Stories (London: Cape, 1975; New York: Viking, 1976); republished as Some Monday for Sure: Selected Short Stories (London: Heinemann Educational, 1976); republished as No Place Like: Selected Stories (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1978);
Burger’s Daughter (London: Cape, 1979; New York: Viking, 1979);
A Soldier’s Embrace: Stories (London: Cape, 1980; New York: Viking, 1980);
What Happened to Burger’s Daughter, Or How South African Censorship Works, by Gordimer and others (Johannesburg: Taurus, 1980);
Town and Country Lovers (Los Angeles: Sylvester & Orphanos, 1980);
July’s People (London: Cape, 1981; New York: Viking, 1981; Braamfontein, South Africa: Ravan / Emmarentia, South Africa: Taurus, 1981);
Something Out There (London: Cape, 1984; New York: Viking, 1984; Braamfontein, South Africa: Ravan / Emmarentia, South Africa: Taurus, 1984); abridged edition (London: Bloomsbury, 1994);
A Sport of Nature (London: Cape, 1987; New York: Knopf, 1987; Cape Town: David Philip, 1987);
The Essential Gesture: Writing, Politics and Places, edited by Stephen Clingman (London: Cape, 1988; New York: Knopf, 1988; Johannesburg: Taurus, 1988);
My Son’s Story (London: Bloomsbury, 1990; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1990; Cape Town: David Philip, 1990);
Jump and Other Stories (London: Bloomsbury, 1991; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1991; Cape Town: David Philip, 1991);
Three in a Bed: Fiction, Morals, and Politics, Ben Belitt Lectureship Series, no. 13 (Bennington, Vt.: Bennington College, 1991);
Crimes of Conscience: Selected Short Stories (Oxford & Portsmouth, N.H.: Heinemann, 1991);
Why Haven’t You Written?: Selected Stories, 1950–1972 (New York: Penguin, 1993);
None To Accompany Me (London: Bloomsbury, 1994; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1994; Cape Town: David Philip, 1994);
Writing and Being (Cambridge, Mass. & London: Harvard University Press, 1995);
Harald, Claudia, and Their Son Duncan [excerpt from The House Gun] (London: Bloomsbury, 1996);
The House Gun (New York: Viking, 1998; London: Bloomsbury, 1998; Cape Town: David Philip, 1998);
Living in Hope and History: Notes from Our Century, edited by Liz Calder (London: Bloomsbury, 1999; New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1999; Cape Town: David Philip, 2000);
Selected Stories (London: Bloomsbury, 2000);
The Pickup (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001; London: Bloomsbury, 2001; Cape Town: David Philip, 2001);
The Ultimate Safari (Johannesburg: Artist’s Press, 2001);
Loot and Other Stories (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2003; London: Bloomsbury, 2003; Glosderry, South Africa: David Philip, 2003);
Get a Life (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2005; London: Bloomsbury, 2005; Claremont, South Africa: David Philip, 2005).
PRODUCED SCRIPTS: Praise, video, Profile Productions, 1981;
Country Lovers, video, Profile Productions, 1982;
Choosing for Justice: Allan Boesak, video, script by Gordimer and Hugo Cassirer, 1983;
Oral History, video, Profile Productions, 1983;
“The Ingot and the Gun, Mozambique-South Africa,” television, Frontiers, BBC l, June 1990;
A Chip of Glass Ruby, video, Films for the Humanities & Sciences/Profile Productions, 1995;
Berlin & Johannesburg: The Wall & The Colour Bar, video, script by Gordimer and Cassirer, 1998.
RECORDING: Nadine Gordimer Reads: A City of the Dead, A City of the Living and The Termitary, read by Gordimer, N.p., Spoken Arts, 1986.
OTHER: The First Circle, in Six One-act Plays by South African Authors (Pretoria, South Africa: Van Schaik, 1949);
South African Writing Today, edited by Gordimer and Lionel Abrahams (Harmondsworth, U.K.: Penguin, 1967);
“Being a Product of Your Dwelling Place,” in The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, edited by Marie Arana (New York: Public Affairs, 2003).
A Nobel Prize winner, an outspoken critic of apartheid, a frequently controversial public figure in her native South Africa, and one of the leading novelists of her age, Nadine Gordimer has been writing since her teens. Her first short story (for children) was published in 1937, when she was thirteen; her first story for adults appeared two years later. Known at first as a writer of fiction, with many early critics believing that she was more successful in the compressed short-story format than in novels, she has become progressively important as a commentator on South African affairs in nonfiction published throughout the English-speaking world. Her political writing and her criticism are often cited in the world of international letters, but she has stated time and again that her fiction is a truth about her society as her nonfiction (which she considers secondary) can never be. Her fiction chronicles the changes in South African society since the late 1940s and offers a remarkable account of the corrosive effects of life in the apartheid state, presented with compassion, irony, and evocative accuracy. In her later fiction she uses the truths learned in the South African situation to examine contemporary issues in the world at large, especially those related to the exercise of privilege and the attempts of the unprivileged to gain access to a better existence. Throughout her career, Gordimer has had to steer a middle path between the conflicting claims of conservative white readers who resented her relentless analyses of white privilege, and of “committed” readers–both white and black–who regarded as trivial or indulgent her insistence that art should not become propaganda.
Nadine Gordimer was born in Springs, a small mining town outside Johannesburg in Transvaal, South Africa, on 20 November 1923. Her father, Isidore Gordimer, was an immigrant Jewish watchmaker from Lithuania who had arrived in South Africa at the age of thirteen; her mother, Nan Myers, had been born in England. A shop-owning family, the Gordimers were part of the white, English-speaking middle class, and Nadine, an only child, was introduced at an early age to the social conformism of that group. Her first novel, The Lying Days (1953), is a bildungsroman that describes in vivid detail the sheltered life of its protagonist, growing up on a mine property in a small town east of Johannesburg.
The central event in Gordimer’s childhood was revealed in an interview with Jannika Hurwitt, published in the Paris Review in 1983 and included in Conversations with Nadine Gordimer (1990). Gordimer’s mother had died in 1976, and it was only after her death that the writer was able to talk publicly about her childhood. In the interview Gordimer describes the loneliness that resulted from her mother’s decision to take her out of school on the pretext of a heart ailment; from the ages of eleven to sixteen, she was educated privately at home. Not only did she have to give up her dancing, which she loved, but also she lived a life cut off from others of her age. She regards access to the local municipal library as her real education, and notes that if she had been a black child, membership would have been barred to her; she says perhaps she would never have become a writer. Reading and then writing took the place of companionship with other children, while the status of alien observer further prepared her for her writing career. The accuracy of Gordimer’s observations and her ear for dialogue have always been noteworthy features of her art.
Before being taken out of school, Gordimer had attended the Convent of Our Lady of Mercy in Springs. She had no further formal education except for a year in a general studies program at the University of the Witwatersrand in Johannesburg in 1945.
Early short stories first published separately in the 1940s illustrate both Gordimer’s sharp eye for detail and her indirect, ironic manner of commenting on the intractability of the injustices entrenched by racial separation. Three of the best-known stories illustrating this theme were published in 1947, before the victory of the National Party–the party that systematized and codified white hegemony in the practice of apartheid–in the general election of 1948. They were republished in her first collection, Face to Face, which appeared in Johannesburg in 1949, and in The Soft Voice of the Serpent and Other Stories, which was published in New York in 1952 and in London the following year and included many of the stories in the earlier volume.
As in so many of her early works, these short stories deal with relations between white overlords and black underlings. The belittling nature of official racial privilege is shown to affect the white characters just as much as the black. The inappropriateness of a bland response to anguish, the soiling effect of a struggle to hang onto possessions, the selfishness of an assertion of control, all these traits are implied in fictional closures that highlight unfulfillment and disconnection.
The protagonist in “Ah, Woe Is Me” is a white woman, visited regularly by her former maid’s daughter, who comes to receive family castoffs and handouts after her mother has ceased to work because of illness. On one visit the daughter is overcome with sobs because of the severity of her mother’s condition. The white woman, not knowing what else to do, merely offers a handkerchief. The puniness of this response provides the ironic power of the story. Even when the protagonist is not obtuse, however, a similar sense of powerlessness and contamination is created from the perspective of the white observer through whose eyes the narrative unfolds.
In “Is There Nowhere Else Where We Can Meet?” the viewpoint is that of a young white woman who is attacked by a ragged black man as she walks alone in the arid winter landscape of the Transvaal. Terrified by his dirt and tattered otherness, she struggles with him until her handbag and parcel fall, and the assailant turns to them, allowing her to run off. She comes to a road with houses and calms down as she approaches safety and order:
She thought of the woman coming to the door, of the explanations, of the woman’s face, and the police. Why did I fight, she thought suddenly. What did I fight for? Why didn’t I give him the money and let him go? His red eyes, and the smell and those cracks in his feet, fissures, erosion. She shuddered. The cold of the morning flowed into her.
She turned away from the gate and went down the road slowly, like an invalid, beginning to pick the blackjacks from her stockings.
Although both attacker and attacked are diminished by the event, it is the black man who is portrayed as the ultimate victim, and this knowledge leaves the protagonist a kind of invalid. The invalid status attendant on the enjoyment of constant privilege is one of the main themes of Gordimer’s fiction during the apartheid period.
In “The Train From Rhodesia” the protagonist is a young woman returning from honeymooning with her husband. At a stop in the middle of nowhere the callow young man haggles with an African carver selling his wares alongside the stationary train. Carelessly he forces a bargain as the train pulls away, and gives his wife the carved lion head she has eyed; but the meanness of his treatment of the artist overwhelms her, making her feel ashamed.
Gordimer married Gerald Gavron in 1949; their daughter, Oriane, was born in 1950. Gordimer and Gavron were divorced in 1952. The following year the firms of Victor Gollancz and Simon and Schuster published The Lying Days. This book, Gordimer’s first published novel (she had abandoned at least two earlier attempts), shows all the evocative skill of the stories but is not as tightly narrated or plotted. It is nevertheless a powerful depiction of both the ethos of Gordimer’s childhood Springs and of the concerns facing someone of her generation, a young adult in South Africa just after World War II. Despite the autobiographical elements, this novel shows Gordimer’s gift for using her imagination to create individual truths that reflect more general, public truths.
The protagonist of The Lying Days, Helen Shaw, experiences personally the crises typical of her era. As an adolescent she is absorbed into the blinkered provincialism of the mine community and her mother’s world. That community manifests not only classic colonial traits but also the more specifically white South African characteristic of living in a world quite separate–physically, imaginatively, and morally–from the raw, teeming humanity of the black mine laborers. Aware of the narrowness of her home life, Helen goes to university in Johannesburg and then moves in a bohemian world in which black people exist as individuals and in which the issues of racial politics are insistently discussed. Helen’s attempts to befriend a black fellow student are both difficult in themselves and viewed with predictably dismissive prejudice by her family. Growing up into such political awareness is accompanied by an increasing maturity in personal relations.
One of the major problems facing Helen and her friends is the spreading nastiness of racial politics in Johannesburg and the corresponding desire to escape from intractable South African society. “South Africa’s a battleground; you can’t belong on a battleground,” says Helen to her old friend Joel as he is about to leave the country. But on the last page of the book, in a moment of epiphany, she takes comfort from the thought that she will return to South Africa: “I’m not running away. Whatever it was I was running away from–the risk of love? the guilt of being white? the danger of putting ideals into practice?–I’m not running away from now because I know I’m coming back here.”
The option of flight–both from commitment to political action itself and from the personal restrictions of South African life–becomes a recurrent element in Gordimer’s fiction. The necessity of staying on–and staying on committed–is investigated insistently in the middle and later fiction.
In 1954 Gordimer married Reinhold Cassirer, a German Jewish refugee from the Nazi regime who had a distinguished career with British Intelligence during World War II and later became an art dealer. Their son, Hugo, was born in 1955. Since her marriage (which lasted until Cassirer’s death in 2001) Gordimer has lived in Johannesburg, with extended travels abroad in many countries.
Gordimer’s second novel, A World of Strangers, was published in 1958 at the height of the liberal movement in South Africa–though the book was banned in that country for twelve years. The late 1950s were years in which intellectuals and artists of all colors strove to live personal lives disregarding the increasingly restrictive codes of official apartheid. Their belief was that ignoring the rules and ethos of separation would ensure its ultimate failure–that good will would triumph over regulations. Much of Gordimer’s fiction from the 1950s on was concerned with analyzing just how mistaken and privileged was this belief, mainly held by well-meaning whites.
That heady aura of unofficial racial mixing in an officially segregated world is vividly captured in A World of Strangers. The late 1950s was the era of a surge of black writing from those who worked on Drum magazine; the articulation, in a not-yet-muzzled press, of the absurdity of government policies; and the pre-Black Consciousness cooperation of student leaders in a non-racial national student union. It was the age of illegal racially mixed parties and the heyday of black “shebeens”–speakeasies patronized by black workers, criminals, and intellectuals, as well as by white intellectuals and activists.
This background forms the setting of A World of Strangers, a title ominously at odds with the intended camaraderie in the “liberal” racial mixing depicted. The protagonist, Toby, is a young Englishman sent to South Africa to work for a publishing house. He finds himself taken up by a group of affluent whites and accepted by a group of bohemian, fast-living blacks. Moving between the lavish bourgeois entertainment of the white social set and the exciting and dangerous shadow-world of his black friends, he has a shallow relationship with a white woman and a searing friendship with a black man. In addition, he meets a genuine political activist, a white labor organizer ultimately arrested for her activities. Her form of quiet commitment contrasts strongly with the pleasure-seeking he encounters in his social adventures on either side of the racial chasm. The death of his black friend in a car accident forces him to recognize the intractability of white suzerainty and the privilege that has enabled him to move “freely” among the two otherwise divided groups. His visitor status has been an additional protection against real involvement in that separated society. He begins to understand not only the falsity of his attempt to remain free of political commitment but also the reality of difference created by systematized racism.
The liberalism of the 1950s ended violently with the Sharpeville massacre in 1960, when white police shot down blacks protesting laws that forbade non-whites from traveling freely in South Africa. The violence resulted in the declaration of a state of emergency and the subsequent arrest and detention without trial of many political figures. From that point, increasingly repressive legislation was introduced, establishing the police state that silenced organized political opposition and drove into exile most of the black intellectuals associated with the liberal renaissance of the 1950s.
In her early work Gordimer depicts the ambiguity and compromises of white liberalism; in her writing published between 1960 and 1994 she analyzes its failure. Occasion for Loving (1963) evokes the period leading up to Sharpeville and investigates the one-sidedness of racial mingling in the Johannesburg of that era. The nonfulfillment at the closing of the novel and the splintering of relationships that it depicts point the way to the aridity of post-1950s life in authoritarian, apartheid South Africa.
Occasion for Loving deals with an aspect of life in mid-century South Africa that featured as the stock-in-trade of some political fiction. Sex across the color line, which was unlawful in that period, resulted in many human indignities, publicly recorded in the press, as law enforcers spied their way into the bedrooms and trysting places of those who were involved with sexual partners of a different race. Both the absurdity of morality squad antics and the human waste involved in “immorality act” prosecutions are treated in some fiction of the period as sensational evidence of the inhumanity of apartheid.
The plot of Occasion for Loving deals with a relationship between a young white woman, educated in England, and a black artist. It is typical of Gordimer’s subtlety that her investigation of illicit love in racially segregated Johannesburg focuses on the commitment or betrayal of the partners themselves–within the context of apartheid corrosion–rather than on the dehumanizing effect of the law itself or the inhumanity of the law-enforcers.
In Occasion for Loving the traumatic interracial love affair is observed by a benign, considerate white woman, Jessie Stilwell, in whose house a visiting white couple have come to stay. Jessie’s husband is a university historian concerned with presenting the overlooked experience of Africans. The young visiting couple, Boaz and Ann, epitomize prejudice-free attitudes of the time; Boaz is involved with black music and musicology. Gideon Shibalo, with whom Ann has her torrid affair, is a black artist, living the high-voltage artistic life of the last moments of racially mixed liberal-bohemian Johannesburg.
The liberal dream of impartiality or freedom from political constraint is presented ironically; even fair-mindedness can be one of the doomed illusions of the privileged white middle class. When Ann becomes embroiled in her love affair with Gideon, Boaz tries to behave decently and not force her to return to him. The delicacy with which those around the lovers allow them the freedom to pursue their dangerously illegal liaison is another example of consideration based on privilege. When Ann abandons her black artist lover and returns to Boaz, she has the freedom to make that choice and pick up a fulfilling life. Gideon has no such privileges, and his shattered reaction to her leaving him is as much a consequence of the politics of his unprivileged status as of the personal pain of losing his lover. To Ann, her love affair with Gideon is part of the exoticism of Africa; to Gideon, his relationship with Ann is an entree to a richer world.
The poisonous effect of this disparity in freedom is wide-ranging. At the end of the book Jessie comes across drunken Gideon at a party. His furious rejection of her encapsulates the pain (for all parties) of entrenched racial privilege and the folly of assuming that liberal attitudes alone can transcend the horrors of apartheid law and practice.
The scene is much darker in Gordimer’s next novel, and the sense of confinement much more marked. The Late Bourgeois World appeared in 1966 when the police and state controls instituted after Sharpeville had taken hold. This novel was also banned by the South African censors. The setting is no longer the world of interracial partying and well-meaning gestures in opposition to apartheid codes and customs but rather the much narrower world of high-risk underground political activity (financed and planned from outside the country), occasional and dangerous meetings of old political acquaintances from another racial group, and violent (if often futile) opposition to the state.
The Late Bourgeois World investigates this strange world of middle-class liberal intellectuals turned saboteurs as part of Gordimer’s continuing analysis of the failure of liberalism in the South African context. The protagonist is Liz, a young, white Johannesburg divorced woman, and the action is confined to the day following her receiving an early-morning telegram informing her that her former husband, Max, has killed himself by driving into Cape Town harbor. She remembers their early life together and reflects on his mixed motives in becoming a “liberal” saboteur. Son of a wealthy and powerful family, he had first thrown himself into nonviolent political opposition and then had made and planted a bomb. Sentenced to five years in prison, he had appeared as a state witness in the trials of others in his group.
The feeling of impasse in the book is not confined to the unraveling of Max’s hopelessly compromised need to find respect through a kind of politics that would be totally opposed to the values of his established family. His position is doomed from the start: “He wanted to come close; and in this country the people–with all the huddled warmth of the phrase–are black. Set aside with whites, even his own chosen kind, he was still left out, he experienced the isolation of his childhood become the isolation of his colour.”
The way Gordimer creates a sense of dead end in this society provides a constant unease and tension in The Late Bourgeois World. For all the posturing of Max’s ineffectual acts, they do involve deadly danger. The presence of both real risk and self-centered display gives an underlying stress to all Liz’s actions. Visited unexpectedly by Luke, an old black acquaintance now underground in the service of a militant black resistance, Liz comes face to face with the possibility of terrifyingly viable political action. He asks her to act as a banker for the movement by allowing money from overseas to be deposited to an account of hers. This activity is useful but would involve her in serious criminal charges if caught. The crisis is not resolved by the end of the book, but the fear and inflexibility in her choice are the chilling factors left dominating her world as she lies awake at the end of the day that opened with the telegram about Max’s death: “the slow, even beats of my heart repeat to me, like a clock; afraid, alive, afraid, alive, afraid, alive.”
The bleak mood of The Late Bourgeois World, and the stasis it depicts, left many readers wondering in what direction Gordimer’s fiction could move. She had argued consistently that she set out to present public and social truths through her representation of private or personal truths, and the public truths of her normal subject matter–life in Johannesburg–seemed fixed in the iron grip of the Afrikaner police state.
The intransigence of the local scene did not inform her next novel, which is set outside South Africa. In A Guest of Honour (1970) she was able to pursue her investigation of both the white person’s role in Africa and the emotional effects of commitment to action, especially political action, without revisiting the dead end revealed in The Late Bourgeois World.
A Guest of Honour is set in an imaginary African state that has recently gained its independence. The protagonist, James Bray, had been a colonial administrator there, sympathetic to the aspirations of the independence movement, and sent home at the insistence of enraged white settlers ten years earlier. As the novel opens, he has been invited to return from retirement in England as a guest of his old friend, the new president, to join the independence celebrations.
The non-South African setting offers Gordimer an opportunity to explore both the politics of African independence with its neocolonial undertow and the personal effect on Bray of the demands of political action. She uses her narrative and descriptive skill to evoke the new African state, capturing its sights, sounds, and smells; in this respect the novel is literally on new ground for her. The dilemma facing Bray, however, is the perennial one in Gordimer’s work: what can a white person do in the context of African politics? How legitimate is white intervention in black affairs, and what are the personal consequences of either inaction or commitment? These themes are implicit in her early fiction and become explicit in the later work. Coupled with the issue of what the consequences are for Bray if he chooses political commitment while officially a “guest” is an involved analysis of sexual potency, sexual jealousy, and the link between invigorating political action–however dangerous–and sexual action (or adventure), however dangerous.
The political situation in the new state soon reveals a bitter tension between the president, Mweta, and a formidable former ally in the struggle for independence, the popular, middle-aged Shinza. Mweta’s attempt to preserve links with international capital force him to take increasingly restrictive actions to silence opposition to his rule, including emergency measures and a Preventive Detention Bill.
Bray finds himself increasingly distressed by Mweta’s position. When asked to stay and produce a report on education, Bray is delighted to commit himself to postretirement action. Not only does he begin to experience the sights and sounds of Africa more vividly as he takes on a new, active role, but also the memory of his retired life in Wiltshire, and the ordered house he has left there, becomes increasingly associated in his imagination with death-like stasis.
The sexual theme manifests itself in this connection between the stimulation of his senses and his invigorating role as someone with a public purpose. The aura of sexual potency surrounding the middle-aged Shinza fascinates Bray when they first meet again after years of absence. Shinza’s confident physicality is of a piece with his unbowed opposition to the repression of the new regime. Bray feels “a queer alarm,” “a restlessness” that “stirred resentfully,” and he sees Shinza as a heroic figure.
When Bray returns to the capital, he makes love to Rebecca Edwards, a young white woman who has been an unobtrusive part of the independence celebrations. While he is making love to her, however, the image of Shinza preoccupies him: “extraordinarily, he was thinking of Shinza. Shinza’s confident smile, Shinza’s strong bare feet. Shinza smoking cigars in the room that smelled of baby. Shinza. Shinza.”
As Bray becomes more deeply involved in the affairs of the new country–and inevitably more closely aligned with Shinza–his love affair with Rebecca deepens. Being alive in every way, then, is associated in A Guest of Honour with Bray’s newfound political purpose and his sexual commitment to Rebecca. Although contained within the narrative of a novel set outside South Africa, this personal flowering once the risks of action have been accepted can be seen as Gordimer’s wrestling with the problems of commitment by whites in South Africa. She returned to that theme in later texts.
The tension between the local rivals grows, and Bray finally agrees to align himself formally with Shinza by going to Europe on his behalf. Before he can leave the country, he is attacked and killed by a rampaging mob, who have no knowledge of his role or allegiances. The random nature of his violent death does not nullify his decision to become involved in the affairs of Mweta’s state but rather underscores the complexity of political action and its outcome. Although in a superficial sense Bray’s political intervention comes to nought, the personal transformation that he has achieved underscores the rightness of his decision to act.
The message of the text is encapsulated in Rebecca’s observations at the end of the novel: “He [Bray] had made his life in accordance with some conscious choice. . . . It didn’t have much to do with being what her father would have called a nigger-lover. But it had something to do with life itself. . . . Bray lived not as an adversary but a participant.” The existential validation of Bray’s choice has been implicit throughout the text, and this judgment of Rebecca’s reinforces it. A Guest of Honour won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in the United Kingdom and the Central News Agency (CNA) Prize in South Africa.
After A Guest of Honour, Gordimer returned to South African topics with one of her best-known works, The Conservationist, in 1974. This novel displays both a new confidence in the inevitable “return” to the land by its autochthonous, albeit currently displaced, inhabitants and a new complexity in her narrative method. In The Conservationist, Gordimer uses a constantly changing point of view, which is usually reflective and part of the ruminative consciousness of its characters. Central to the streams of consciousness in the novel is its protagonist, Mehring, a pig-iron industrialist who has bought a “weekend farm” just outside Johannesburg. His fears, prejudices, and relived personal history are at the core of the text, and not only do his reveries and memories reflect on one another to form a complex pattern of evasions and truths, but also the often indifferent points of view of those of all races existing on the fringes of his domain further illuminate both the context of his thoughts and the gaps in that thinking.
To Mehring, the farm is an escape from the pressing concerns of his successful Johannesburg life, a place to bring a woman, and part of a sentimental belief that he is “attached” to “his” land when enjoying the privacy and slow pace of the weekend estate. The text investigates the folly of this belief and the superficiality of his claim to belong. Parallel to his musings runs a series of descriptions of the events and concerns of the motley band of black laborers and their hangers-on who live on his land and about whom he knows next to nothing. The indestructible reality of their unprivileged and yet intimate link to the place, owned but not lived-on by the absentee Mehring, is suggested in the record of their actions and the faint but nonetheless important connection those actions have to ancient indigenous custom. To Mehring, the activities of his black laborers are incomprehensible and, like the proximity of a black “location” just off his land, part of the cross he has to bear while maintaining his privacy and his property.
The major worries that confront Mehring in his relentless internal debate over the circumstances of his life are provoked by the discovery of a black corpse, never identified, on his land. The local white police callously bury the body in a shallow grave and depart, leaving Mehring unnerved by both their brutish unconcern and by the alien presence in rather than on his land. The crisis in Mehring’s imagination grows when the corpse is washed up in a flood. He experiences a vicarious sensuous identification with the corpse in his unguarded moments of reverie, and he smells or feels the earth and mud and reeds in his imagination as if he were indeed as possessed by the land as is the black body.
This sabotage by his sensory imagination is one element in Mehring’s unease. Another is his dislike of the self-righteousness of his liberal former mistress, Antonia, and the half-baked political orthodoxies of his teenage son, Luke. As he remembers and relives encounters with these two intimates, all three are shown to be self-righteous in different ways, and the sterility of the debate between “liberalism” and “realism” in their interchanges is of a piece with the aridity of Mehring’s daily world of possessions and things. In contrast to these unsettling and inconclusive discussions, the landscape is constantly evoked, as is the earthbound life of the black farm-dwellers.
At the end of the novel, when Mehring takes flight–abroad–from his growing paranoia, the blacks on the farm ceremoniously rebury the nameless corpse in a closing passage that celebrates the enduring certainty of their claim to be there, in contrast with Mehring’s indulgent and temporary ownership of the land:
The one whom the farm received had no name. He had no family but their women wept a little for him. There was no child of his present but their children were there to live after him. They had put him away to rest, at last; he had come back. He took possession of this earth, theirs; one of them.
The apartheid regime appeared to be immutably established in 1974 when The Conservationist appeared. Gordimer’s joint focus in that text on the intellectual and emotional underpinnings of white occupation in South Africa as well as on the abiding nature of the black presence was courageously optimistic, almost Utopian, at that time. Although the novel is best known for the subtlety with which Mehring’s culture is examined, it is the first South African novel by Gordimer to show a positive hint of an ultimate black return to the land. That closing mainly serves to highlight the puniness of the involuted claims to ownership made by Mehring and those like him, but the image of black repossession of the land was a new element in Gordimer’s work. The Conservationist won both the Booker Prize in the United Kingdom and the CNA Prize in South Africa.
In her later work, written during the tumultuous period of social upheaval and change after the apartheid state was dismantled, the optimistic element is more pronounced; however flawed the attempts to achieve revolutionary change in these texts, Gordimer never doubts the ultimate certainty of change. Once change has occurred and is entrenched, she does investigate the shabby accommodations made by both sides of the former racial divide to preserve–or gain access to–privilege and wealth.
In Gordimer’s next novel, Burger’s Daughter (1979), the failures on the road to change are examined at the same time as the “sanctity” of political commitment. In its examination of the connections between personal and public obligation, and in its treatment of the nature of political engagement, Burger’s Daughter returns to the issues first raised in A Guest of Honour. The mood of the later text is much more intense, however, and its context more intractable. Burger’s Daughter became her third novel to be banned in South Africa.
Again, Gordimer’s narrative in Burger’s Daughter is complex. It includes direct narration, sections addressed to an imagined listener or reader by the protagonist herself, and passages of inner reflection. The result is a multilayered weaving of revelation and comment in which the dialogic nature of the “truth” of any situation is presented in different voices and from different vantage points.
The protagonist, Rosa Burger, is the daughter of a renowned, white South African communist who dies in prison serving a life sentence for his political activities. Born into a family in which political commitment and action in the face of an oppressive regime are taken to be natural and inevitable obligations, Rosa grows up immersed in political activity and sacrifice. After her father’s death, Rosa seeks an identity of her own, other than that of “Lionel’s daughter,” with all the automatic assumptions of political allegiance that go along with that name. In reaction to the constant suffering of her past, she finds her “silence hammered sullen, hysterical, repetitive without words: sick, sick of the maimed, the endangered, the fugitive, the stoic; sick of courts, sick of prisons, sick of institutions scrubbed bare for the regulation endurance of dread and pain.”
The ethos of her family house, with its logical application of Marxist theory to daily events and its easy acceptance of comradeship in the struggle, regardless of race, is established throughout the text, both in Rosa’s memories and in the contacts she has with those of the political faithful still alive and out of jail. The weirdness of that life and the extreme nature of its demands are pointed out to her constantly by the individualistic young man, Conrad, with whom she shares a cottage. His existential concerns are entirely personal and private. Conrad’s irony reinforces Rosa’s own uneasiness with the automatic obligations she is expected, as her father’s daughter, to shoulder. The emptiness of Conrad’s self-centered worldview also emerges quite clearly, and his inability even to understand the transcendent, ultimately liberating nature of the Burger ethos tips the balance of their debate.
When faced with both the routine expectations from the tight circle of the faithful and the compromises of her white status in the static world of apartheid-triumphant South Africa, Rosa decides that she can no longer live in Lionel’s country. She obtains a passport and travels to the South of France to visit her father’s first wife.
Here the tone of the book alters, as does its pace. Rosa tries to learn–as an adult–how to live a private life without public obligations. She enters a world of slow time, totally different from the steely and hurried ethos of courts, prisons, political meetings, and police surveillance of Johannesburg. In the lush scenery and leisured atmosphere of the Côte d’Azur, she moves in a circle of charming and comparatively aimless people to whom political freedoms and civil rights are topics for discussion in an established democracy that is home to political refugees like Rosa.
Rosa begins a “civilised” relationship with a married French schoolteacher as part of her adaptation to a new, private life. Her plans to remain in this unpressured milieu–and lapse into the timeless French role of mistress–are overturned after a searing encounter in London. At a meeting of South African exiles and activists she meets the now adult black man who had been her childhood friend in her father’s house. Son of a black activist close to Lionel, the black child and Rosa had shared all normal childhood experiences in the nonracial atmosphere of “that house.” As an embittered adult, he resents Rosa’s easy acceptance of their past relationship and the celebrated status she enjoys as her father’s daughter. His father, too, was a victim of the struggle, and is now forgotten. Rosa’s condescension-he argues–entails her thinking that she can share an intimacy with him. The unsurmountable nature of their difference is epitomized by Rosa’s addressing him as “Baasie,” the name by which she knew him in childhood. He points out to her the inappropriateness now of this “white” nickname used in the Burger household when his real name is “Zwelinzima”–meaning “suffering land.”
Infuriated by his attack on her personally and on her memories of childhood, Rosa hits back with insults of her own, and is horrified to find herself using the weapons of whiteness and feeling the guilt of whiteness–both activities scorned in the rational mode of the Burger house in its prime. Rosa accuses Zwelinzima of making brave statements when he is safely out of the country, and even asks him if it is money he wants. Those sneers are part of her retrospective humiliation: “In one night we succeeded in manoeuvring ourselves into the position their history books back home have had ready for us–him bitter; me guilty.”
There is no other option for Rosa but to return to South Africa and take up the responsibility from which she has attempted to flee. In the section of the text addressed to her dead father, Rosa acknowledges that “No one can defect”; that she has joined the inevitable struggle against suffering: “Yes, it’s strange to live in a country where there are still heroes. Like anyone else, I do what I can.” The novel ends with her in prison on a political charge.
The issues raised in Burger’s Daughter are debated with great subtlety. The novel offers both a tribute to old-guard South African communists and an analysis of their strengths and weaknesses. To date, it is the last of Gordimer’s novels to treat political and personal issues within the critical realist mode. After Burger’s Daughter she stopped using the technique of allowing a close examination of personal truths to reveal general, public truths. She began to incorporate speculation into her texts and to predict imagined events. Those events have a paradigmatic quality and, like the personal sagas in her earlier fiction, reveal an emblematic truth. Often, their verisimilitude (a Gordimer trademark since her earliest writing) is coupled to a clearly “unrealistic”–because imagined–narrative located in the future.
Her next novel, July’s People, which appeared in 1981, is set in the future and shows Gordimer’s skill at the re-creation of the texture of local setting and scenery. The combination of speculation about future events and minutely accurate depictions of the locales in which they occur is Gordimer’s way of analyzing not so much the path of events to come but elements in the reality of the present that could lead to such events.
July’s People is set in a period of increasing anarchy as revolutionary civil war grips South Africa. The white protagonists, Bam and Maureen Smales, flee from their suburban Johannesburg home as urban guerilla fighting reaches the Witwatersrand. With their children and household servant, July, they take refuge in the small black village from which July comes. There, anonymously part of the peasant population, they are safe from the fighting but have to cope with the loss of their old identities and existence.
While the children accommodate themselves comparatively easily to their rudimentary new lives, the white adults have more difficulty. Bam tries desperately to hold onto the symbols of his white male authority, his shotgun and his van. But in the limited circumstances of the village, even these are “shared,” or taken from him. Maureen, who has had the closest relation to July, has most difficulty adjusting her “liberal” views on race relations to her new dependency on her servant.
Gordimer offers a relentless analysis of the tainted nature of the entwined relations between mistress (or master) and servant. Even Maureen’s “liberal” scruples–in the Johannesburg days–about the way July should be treated are shown to have been indulgent attempts by her to set the terms of the relationship. In a crucial final confrontation with July, Maureen at last “understands everything” when he angrily speaks back at her in his own language, which–linguistically–she cannot understand at all. July’s People presupposes the collapse of white South African military power at some point in the future, but it is the collapse of white moral authority in the present that the novel analyzes.
Something Out There (1984), in which Gordimer continued her emblematic approach to the present with an imaginative investigation of events that could take place, is a collection of short stories and the title novella, Something Out There, which was republished separately under the same title in 1994. The collection reveals Gordimer’s interest in forms of betrayal, a theme that suits the turbulent, violent mood of South Africa in the 1980s, when the post-Soweto era combined massive police repression and an increasingly confident amount of organized, violent resistance to the regime. The mood was no longer static, as it had been from the mid 1960s to the mid 1970s, and the short fiction reflects this period of “interregnum.”
The novella Something Out There vividly captures the moods and modes of a cross-section of white South Africans from the Johannesburg area who are disturbed and confused by the antics of an escaped ape that appears and disappears at inconvenient moments. The quirkish and insular reactions of the “besieged” whites to the inexplicable forays of the ape are counterpoised against their ignorance of the real threat in their midst. Parallel to the ape subplot runs the narrative of a racially mixed group of saboteurs who rent a small farm outside Johannesburg (the black saboteurs pose as the whites’ servants or laborers) in order to prepare for an attack on a power station. The anonymity of the group is both “official”–the police have to deduce who they were after the attack–and embodied in the text. The reader knows them only superficially, as they concentrate totally on their task, and the obtuse locals have no idea of their true motives. The novella concludes with a passage similar to that at the end of The Conservationist, predicting the inevitable “rightness” of a return to autochthonous ownership.
Gordimer has written short stories throughout her career, and her collections have appeared at regular intervals. Friday’s Footprint and Other Stories (1960) won the W. H. Smith Literary Award, and other collections have been enthusiastically received. Her Selected Stories, which first appeared in 1975, is a much-read collection of her best short fiction published up to that date.
The themes and styles of her stories follow the same general development as the novels: from those early evocations of the compromised positions of whites under apartheid to more complex presentations of the “colonial” world in both South Africa and the Africa beyond its borders. Interspersed with stories that reflect Gordimer’s perennial political concerns are apolitical tales that reveal aspects of human relationships–and the failure of those relationships–brought into sudden focus by a chance word or deed or moment of understanding. The title novella illustrates the path Gordimer’s fiction took at this point of her career; an imaginative re-creation of how things could be. Her later fiction frequently has this conditional impulse as its starting point.
A Sport of Nature (1987) developed the speculative, conditional mood. Its plot involves typically realistic evocations of the Johannesburg liberal/left world from the 1960s on, with fictional re-creation of historical events, the inclusion of real persons into the overarching historical narrative, cameo appearances by characters such as Rosa Burger from Gordimer’s other works, and the imagined course of events in the future, such as the successful conclusion to the liberation struggle in South Africa.
At the heart of the novel is its protagonist, Hillela, the white “sport” (or freak) of nature who breaks through the impasse created in so much of Gordimer’s fiction. Hillela’s vision of a transcending, nonracial partnership is embodied in a recurring image of clasped hands and enacted in her physical union with two black political figures. Her first husband, an exiled African National Congress (ANC) official, is assassinated by South African agents. Her second husband, an African general, regains military control over his state and plays a Pan-African role as its leader. She produces a “rainbow family” with the birth of her decidedly nonwhite daughter, acts effectively in many capacities for the ANC, and is there with her second husband at the final independence celebrations in Cape Town.
Her mixture of personal unscrupulousness and unerringly accurate public moves is treated wryly in the text. “Trust Hillela” is a comment made by many who know her, and it is made with all imaginable nuances of tone, from approval or admiration to exasperated understanding of her inevitably self-centered behavior. In much of the work of Gordimer’s middle period the folly of asserting liberal values in the brutal apartheid state was the focus of her irony. In A Sport of Nature a life lived without liberal sensibility is shown to be disconcertingly self-assured, even though Hillela’s freakish directness enables her to achieve what no other white character does in Gordimer’s fiction. In order to create a white character successfully integrated into the liberation struggle, Gordimer has to produce a “sport of nature” and postulate a utopian ending to the liberation wars.
A Sport of Nature is a complex book, and its tone is difficult to pin down. What it does show is the tendency of Gordimer’s later fiction to align itself closely with the necessity and value of radical political action itself. Her focus of interest has changed. In her earlier work she investigates what individuals do in demanding situations, and implicit in the truth of these personal actions is a general truth. In her later work she sets out to represent how certain kinds of political action or commitment could occur.
Gordimer’s change of focus is particularly evident in My Son’s Story (1990) and in many of the short stories collected in Jump and Other Stories (1991). Some of the stories are fable-like tales about the South African situation; others take incidents (such as a mob attack on a rival black figure) typical of the daily news, using reports of violence and horror as the starting point for investigations of what it would be like to be involved in those incidents. My Son’s Story is an extended depiction of the nature of determined opposition to apartheid and of risk-taking to overcome it. For the first time, the protagonists in a Gordimer novel are mainly nonwhite.
The protagonist of My Son’s Story appears at first to be Sonny, a mixed-race schoolteacher dedicated to resistance to apartheid and service to the liberation movement. Part of the narrative comes directly from his son, Will, who struggles with his father’s marital infidelity and the effect it has on the family. At the end of the novel, Will records his own emergence as a writer–the trauma of political and personal strain has driven him to writing–and the whole account of the family saga is presented as his. Much of the preceding third-person narrative entails approving, impassioned comment on the nature of resistance by downtrodden political figures like Sonny. That celebration of the phoenix-like quality of nonwhite determination to acquire its due share of the country is typical of the tone of Gordimer’s later work, even if offered as that of the sensitive, easily bruised, young novelist Will.
Just as Will emerges as a protagonist equally important as his at-first dominant father, Sonny, so do the actions of the women in the family become progressively more significant. Aila, the wife and mother of the family, has much to put up with. Sonny’s political career means that he is constantly under surveillance and serves time in prison. He becomes infatuated with a young white political ally and is obsessed by his relationship with her. Seen at first as merely the dutiful wife who endures both the political stresses of life with Sonny and the shame of his infidelity, Aila emerges as a secret activist at the end of the novel, and one who has chosen a far more violent path than that taken by her husband, whose resistance activities are those of the old guard. The apparently vacant, pleasure-seeking younger daughter is also shown to have a secret, committed life, and she flees the country before the police catch up with her. Her father and brother are until then unaware of her links with the violent underground.
The tone of commitment to such action in Gordimer’s works in the 1980s reflects a change from the neutral and ironic mode of her early and middle works. As the scene in South Africa became more violent and volatile, her celebration of those single-minded activists–and her certainty that their cause would prevail–became an insistent feature of her writing.
When Gordimer was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1991, there was widespread approval. The prize was seen as appropriate recognition of her lifelong commitment to both the art of fiction and to opposing the horrors of apartheid in her writing. This significant act of public recognition came at a time when South Africa itself was in the process of change, and Gordimer’s role as critic was turning into that of an internationally recognized commentator on the complexities of political change. She had been an international figure for more than twenty years before the Nobel Prize, and that latest honor did not change her lifelong commitment to clear-sighted analysis–whatever the political or personal consequences. She spent the prize money on her family, and in part on the Congress of South African Writers.
Once political change became really possible in South Africa, Gordimer’s manner itself changed. Nelson Mandela was released in 1990 after many years of imprisonment, and negotiations began among the still-ruling Afrikaner National Government and all interested parties, including previously banned groups such as the ANC, to produce a new constitution that would lead to general elections open to all in 1994. That same year, Gordimer’s novel None To Accompany Me appeared. In it she attempts to explain both the courage of members of “The Movement,” negotiating the first democratic state under threat of assassination from a shadowy Third Force, and their vulnerability to disclosure for past actions (regarded by some as crimes) in the old underground resistance. In this uneasy period, beset with distrust and disbelief that the old regime will keep its word, the characters are shown to live out their public lives. There is a major change in Gordimer’s approach: the public truth is more important than the personal. Near the end of the novel the protagonist muses, “The evidence of personal life was around her, but her sense was of the personal life as transitory, it is the political life that is transcendent.”
In None To Accompany Me sexual attitudes are discussed openly in the same way as political positions are analyzed. The two are fused in the contrast between Didymus, an old-time activist in The Movement, and his wife, Sibongile, a newcomer to politics and a powerful personality in the period of negotiation for a new state. But the new confidence of the female politician vis-à-vis the traditional caution of the male member of the old political guard is not as central to the texture of the novel as the ongoing discussion between the protagonist, Vera Stark, and her lesbian daughter. Vera is a white lawyer, working for the Legal Foundation committed to representing black interests in cases involving apartheid-era “resettlement” (segregation) of communities and the current claim of blacks to return to the areas from which they had been removed. Vera’s sexual past is one of the features of her life that she has to reassess in the light of her daughter’s declared sexual preference. Vera sees her own infidelities (with her current husband) during her first marriage as a feature in her daughter’s own sexual makeup. This realization, together with her growing sense of quiescence as the struggle to end apartheid is taken over by newcomers like Sibongile, leads her to leave her former home and live as a tenant with her black colleague, Zeph Rapulana.
The use of a word such as “tenant” is typical of the emblematic element in Gordimer’s writing after 1990. Just as her own stark emotional condition at the end of the novel mirrors her name, so Vera moves into an almost elegiac mode as the book ends and she accepts her white tenant status in the about-to-be-born homeland of the previously dispossessed.
None To Accompany Me is set in a specific period and deals predominantly with the issues of that moment of negotiation when the old regime had not departed and the new era had not yet arrived. The problems of those negotiating the change and returning from exile or underground are her focus. This closely focused historical impulse leaves the novel somewhat dated now that those concerns are past.
Gordimer’s next novel, The House Gun (1998), is set in the new South Africa after Mandela and the ANC had clearly won the first democratic election in 1994. The new regime, unquestionably in power, is nevertheless beset with the chronic problem of random violence and crime in a society throwing off a recognition of civil authority together with the authoritarian trappings of the former era. Gordimer’s interest in The House Gun is not so much on the present but on the legacy of the past and how that has produced the violent contemporary climate.
The plot hinges on the catastrophic change wrought in the lives of a white professional Johannesburg couple and their son when the latter shoots dead a homosexual former lover who has seduced his current heterosexual partner. Suddenly, the mother-protagonist, Claudia, finds herself in the same situation as that of the many black mothers of sons awaiting trial for murder; her son, Duncan, finds a new identity with the nameless mass of common criminals, mainly black, in prison. The title of the novel offers an emblematic pointing to the past causes of the violent present. The murder is committed spontaneously with the house gun, which lies around the dwelling shared by Duncan, his lover, and others. Its casual presence is a symbol of the omnipresence of violence in the new state. The text investigates the cause of this reliance on violence after years of rule based on force rather than legitimacy.
Duncan’s parents, Claudia and Harald, have to adjust not only to a world in which they are suddenly linked emotionally and physically (in jail and court) with the masses, but also to their client status with a black lawyer, newly returned from exile, who defends their son. His manner, both professional and domestic, is alien to their middle-class white conventions, and both his otherness and their dependence on him entail a realization of their ingrained prejudices as well as their need to suppress them.
Gordimer has often used personal crises as a means of examining public or political values. The difference between her treatment of the interaction of the public and the private in classic works such as The Conservationist and Burger’s Daughter and the themes in The House Gun is that in the late work she abandons the layered, dialogic method of the middle-period texts and resorts to a much more explicit, didactic tone.
A need to explain both the suppressed evidence of the apartheid era and–through “testimony” of what is unknown or unexamined in that period–to recognize a common identity with all South Africans in the new state is one of the issues Gordimer discusses in Writing and Being (1995), which consists of the Charles Eliot Norton lectures that she delivered at Harvard in 1994. In three of those lectures Gordimer focuses on the legacy of the years under apartheid and points to the possibility of reconstructing an understanding of the apartheid era as an essential part of understanding the present and the nature of a common national identity: “testimony in my country today is not only provision against forgetting what we knew; it is also the provision of what we never knew.” The easy use of the possessive “my” in “my country” and the equally natural use of “we” form a feature of the new South Africa that Gordimer celebrates in Writing and Being. South Africans need no longer, in her view, be distinguished either by color or by political views.
Even after the official demise of apartheid and the emergence of the new state, Gordimer is still analyzing the present in terms of the effects of the authoritarian racism that formed the subject of almost all her fiction. The accompanying theme is the present dilemma of the flood of refugees from conflict, poverty, and oppression worldwide. In The Pickup (2001) the legacy of apartheidera privilege informs the text from the outset. The protagonist, Julie Summers, is white and independent. She lives an ostentatiously “liberated” life among a group of like-minded, young, middle-class South Africans of all colors who meet in the would-be trendy L. A. Café and discuss their world in a rather determinedly open-minded way. There, Julie is in her defining milieu, “a bazaar of all that the city had not been allowed to be by the laws and traditions of her parents’ generation.” But the confident assertion of this sense of liberation is undercut–in Gordimer’s external descriptions–by a sense of its smugness. That externality is a constant feature in The Pickup.
Julie’s life changes when she meets Abdu, an illegal Arab immigrant who fixes her broken-down car. She takes him from the grungy garage in which he works to the L. A. Café to meet her circle, begins a relationship with him, and takes him to her father’s bourgeois Sunday lunch in the prosperous suburb that she believes she has forever rejected. The guests at the Sunday ritual are not all white. The new power elite is there in force, and all share a confident acceptance of influence and prestige. Julie is mortified at her inherited privilege being revealed to her impoverished lover, and she watches him as he “listens to this intimate language of money. . . . She is overcome by embarrassment–what is he thinking of these people–she is responsible for whatever that may be. She is responsible for them.” Abdu’s reaction is, however, quite different from what she imagines. Back in the room they share as a love nest, Julie is bewildered by his realistic appraisal of the usefulness of the background she rejects: “Interesting people there. They make a success.”
Julie marries Abdu; when he is deported from South Africa, she returns with him to his home village on the fringes of the desert. As his “accompanying wife” she is likely to be influential in securing him an entry visa in his relentless pursuit of immigration to the industrialized West and escape from the confines of his home and its customs in the Islamic village. Yet, in that village Julie begins to experience an authenticity that she sees as superior to Abdu’s incessant search for immigrant status in the West. Her divorced mother in California does eventually prove useful, and Abdu receives immigration clearance for the United States.
At this point of apparent triumph–and a kind of vindication of her marriage and support–Julie decides that life in the genuineness of the village is preferable to the constant humiliation of life as a third-world immigrant in the West:
Living in a dirty hovel, a high-rise one or a shed behind a garage, what’s the difference, with Christ knows what others of the wrong colours, poor devils like himself (as he used to say), cleaning American shit . . . doing the jobs that real people, white Americans, won’t do themselves.
Abdu is infuriated by her decision to remain in the village rather than accompany him. When he asks where she got the idea, an authorial voice gives the answer: “And while his anguish batters them both she now knows where. The desert.”
Gordimer has used non-South African settings frequently in her fiction. In some texts her South African characters spend periods abroad as part of their means of coping with South Africa. In others the setting is entirely outside South Africa. The Pickup is distinct, however, in that the South African baggage that Julie carries with her abroad is intricately connected to her reaction to life in the world at large and the issues that affect far more than her native land.
In Loot and Other Stories (2003) there is a familiar mixture of stories set entirely outside South Africa and those dealing with life in the “new” South Africa. In “Visiting George,” the memory of an old antiapartheid fighter living in London during the apartheid era is delicately created in the description of an imagined meeting. The aura of his life and surroundings and values is seen as part of a vanished era.
A distinctive piece in this volume is “Karma,” in which the possibilities of reincarnation or “transmigration” are examined; varied narrative voices and personae recount incidents that occur at different periods but have overlapping elements. Explicit depiction of the corruption and cronyism in the new South Africa appears for the first time in “Karma,” and the deadpan mode with which Gordimer allows the facts of her story to emerge is reminiscent of the most effective moments of her middle career. One of the protagonists, living an idyllic life in a desirable house with her successful husband and children, is found guilty of accepting bribes as an important player in the new state. Norma is white and was active in the resistance movement under apartheid. Her reward in the new state has been to become influential first in public works and then in an ostensibly private contracting company. Her lawyer explains the situation to her husband, Arthur; he has “obtained the best that could be expected: a heavy fine and suspended sentence. . . . Her background as a white who had suffered to bring about a just society, and the fact that she was female, the lawyer lectured, were the only mitigating factors in her favour.” The innocent and naive Arthur finds himself bewildered: “And even if this had saved Norma, Arthur felt angry at the insult to her intelligence, all she had been and was. And there was bewilderment in him, at his anger: would he rather accept that his Norma was deviously dishonest?” The suspension of explicit judgment in the writing, and the clarity in the presentation of the complexity of the situation itself, are reminiscent of Gordimer’s best works.
In Get a Life (2005) the multiracial reality of the new South Africa is a given. Not only do members of all racial groups mix constantly, but also the public concerns raised by the novel are not directly related to the racial issues of the fiction written during the apartheid era or that written as the new state emerged. Protection of the environment in the face of international “development” projects emerges as a crucial concern in this South Africa.
The novel falls into two parts. In the first, personal health threatened by radioactivity is an issue for all those connected to protagonist Paul, who is living in relative isolation in his parents’ house while recuperating from surgery for thyroid cancer and subsequent radiation treatment. In the second, environmental health–with a threat of nuclear-reactor development-becomes the dominant concern as Paul, now totally recovered, returns to the outside world and his career as an ecologist. In both parts he reflects on the values of his mother, a successful lawyer, and his wife, a prominent advertising executive; both are creatures of the public world “out there.”
In the second part of the novel the “health” of the environment, threatened by development projects of all kinds (dams, nuclear reactors, and drainage of natural swamp lands) becomes the central focus of both Paul’s own thoughts and the conversations he has with others and in particular with his effervescent black colleague, Thapelo. A proposed “pebble-bed reactor” to be placed in an environmentally unique–and sensitive–area takes over the choric threat of Paul’s personal radioactivity in the earlier parts of the novel.
The style of Get a Life is different from that of Gordimer’s previous work. Just as the juxtaposition of a personal, medical threat in the first part with an overriding environmental threat in the second is strained, so too Gordimer’s prose is often clotted. She uses authorial commentary throughout. Terse, choric sentences–often difficult to read–frequently break up whatever action there is as the author reflects on the issues being presented. “So, what is this kind of stuff, thinking. . . . Heresy, how can it come to one who when asked, And what is your line, answers, What am I, I’m a conservationist, I’m one of the new missionaries here not to save souls but to save the earth.” This stylistic approach is decidedly different from that in her major mid-career work on a “conservationist.” What Get a Life illustrates is Gordimer’s continual focus on the changing realities of the world she depicts and her concern for the “health”–however broadly defined–of that world.
Nadine Gordimer’s career is remarkable for the range of work she has produced and for the consistently penetrating analyses of her society that she offers. The changes of emphasis in those analyses have been remarkably constant indicators of the changes in the society itself. The style of her latest fiction shows that she is still developing new approaches in her lifelong attempt to understand the human condition in her strife-torn native land and in the current world at large.
Interviews
Nancy Topping Bazin and Marilyn Dallman Seymour, eds., Conversations with Nadine Gordimer (Jackson & London: University Press of Mississippi, 1990).
References
Ariel, special Gordimer issue, 19 (October 1988); Stephen Clingman, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: History from the Inside (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985);
John Cooke, The Novels of Nadine Gordimer: Private Lives/Public Landscapes (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1985);
Bruce King, ed., The Later Fiction of Nadine Gordimer (London: Macmillan, 1993);
Judie Newman, Nadine Gordimer (London & New York: Routledge, 1988);
Salmagundi, special Gordimer issue, 62 (Winter 1984);
Rowland Smith, ed., Critical Essays on Nadine Gordimer (Boston: G.K. Hall, 1990).
Papers
The Nadine Gordimer Papers, in The Lilly Library, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, is the most significant holding of Gordimer’s papers. This collection includes approximately 6,700 items covering the years 1934 to 1991 and consists of correspondence with colleagues, literary agents, and publishers; manuscripts, typescripts, and corrected proofs of short stories, novels, articles, lectures, and speeches; a childhood diary, notebooks, and research materials. The Nadine Gordimer Collection of the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin, consists of thirteen corrected typescripts for short stories published in Friday’s Footprint and Other Stories (1960) and Not for Publication and Other Stories (1965), and the corrected typescript for the novel A World of Strangers (1958).